


every lie starts with a truth

by Forestgreengirl



Category: Sanders Sides (Web Series)
Genre: Angst, Anxiety | Virgil Sanders Needs a Hug, Anxiety | Virgil Sanders is a Dark Side, Complicated Relationships, Dark Sides As Family (Sanders Sides), Deceit | Janus Sanders Needs a Hug, Former Dark Side Anxiety | Virgil Sanders, Gen, Hopeful Ending, How The Light Sides Found Out Virgil Used To Be A Dark Side asmr, Kinda, Light Sides As Family (Sander Sides), Morally Neutral Deceit | Janus Sanders
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-05 23:41:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25803808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Forestgreengirl/pseuds/Forestgreengirl
Summary: “You’re a traitor, Virgil.” Deceit  suddenly spits, eyes snapping up to glare at Virgils, disdain clear in them.Virgil barely resists the urge to flinch.or(A different take on how Thomas and the Light Sides could have found out about Virgil being a former Dark Side. ft. Virgil & Deceit & all of their issues)
Relationships: Anxiety | Virgil & Creativity | Roman & Logic | Logan & Morality | Patton, Anxiety | Virgil Sanders & Dark Creativity | Remus "The Duke" Sanders, Anxiety | Virgil Sanders & Dark Creativity | Remus "The Duke" Sanders & Deceit | Janus Sanders, Anxiety | Virgil Sanders & Deceit | Janus Sanders, Anxiety | Virgil Sanders & Everyone, Anxiety | Virgil Sanders & Logic | Logan Sanders
Comments: 2
Kudos: 154
Collections: Sander Sides





	every lie starts with a truth

“You should know this, Virgil! You used to be  _ all for it!”  _ Deceits tone is sharp, and harsh, and just bordering on desperate, and it makes Virgil's skin itch beneath his jacket.

Deceit wasn’t wrong, Virgil used to support Thomas doing only what’s right for  _ him,  _ ignoring the needs of others. But Virgil isn’t-  _ can’t be,  _ that person again, he’s a  _ Light Side  _ now, he can’t go back to being who he was before. 

He also doesn’t like that Deceit has chosen  _ now  _ of all times to make everything known, the other Sides, and Thomas were already looking frazzled, and bored in Logan’s case; and the moment Deceit opened their mouth, Virgil knew that they weren’t going to let this go. 

“Deceit that’s  _ enough!  _ Let it  _ go!”  _ Virgil hates raising his voice, it sets of everything in his instincts in one breath, but he’s steadily sliding down-hill to everything being  _ fucked. _

Virgil won’t lose it all, now now, not after he’s worked so hard for it.

Logan’s eyes narrow in his direction, and Virgil has a very brief, intense moment of panic because it was Logan who first approached him, months ago, about where Virgil had come from-

_ “Anxiety? I apologise if you were in the middle of something, but I would like to ask, and you don’t need to answer; how did you get to this side of the mindplace? Where did you come from?”  _

_ Virgil barely hesitated, Logan himself had always been the more neutral of the sides, and he had interacted with the side enough to know what his response would be to it, “The Others. I didn’t want to be there.” _

_ Logan just nodded, and Virgil lost his breath, it can’t of just been that easy? _

_ “Thankyou, for telling me the truth.”- _

-and out of all of the others, Logan is the person that would easily be able to work it out, he doesn’t represent logic for nothing. 

“No! Thomas needs to do what’s right for  _ himself.” _

“Thomas is a good person, Deceit! You can’t sway him like that!” Patton interrupts, tone loud and panicked; Morality had never handled these sorts of arguments well, and usually Virgil would be content to let them fight between themselves, but Deceit is about to ruin  _ everything.  _

_ (Virgil refuses to think, that even now, after all this time, the sight of Deceit being upset still makes his stomach churn; he never liked seeing his friends distressed) _

“Doing what’s right for yourself, doesn’t cancel out you being a good person! That’s not how it works.” 

Roman is looking and more and more like he’s about to start dissociating at any moment; Virgil relates. They’ve had this conversation hundreds of times since Deceit had made himself known, it always ending the same way.

Some temporary agreement, fuming tempers, and the mindscape being  _ tense.  _ Virgil can’t even judge them for not working it out already; he’s not one for confrontation. 

“You’re a traitor,  _ Virgil.”  _ Deceit suddenly spits, eyes snapping up to glare at Virgils, disdain clear in them.

Virgil barely resists the urge to flinch, his instinct to  _ run,  _ or to  _ fight,  _ kicking up. He’s a little bit annoyed to see that the other sides, and Thomas aren’t even trying to hide their curiosity; Virgil doesn’t answer questions about before, so there’s so much they want to  _ know. _

He wishes they could of chosen a  _ better  _ time to find these things out.

“What do you mean?” Patrons voice is quiet, but filled with the usual airy curiosity, and Virgil has never wanted to make somebody  _ shut-up  _ more. From what Virgil knows, Logan never told anybody about what Virgil told him, Roman could possibly know, what with Virgil having grown up with Remus and all; but Patton was never explicitly told, he doesn’t want him to find out like this.

“Oh, do they not  _ know  _ Virgil? I thought you  _ trusted them.”  _ Deceit knows what he’s doing, he knows exactly how to play Virgil, they’ve been doing this dance since they manifested, it used to simultaneously hate it, and love it.

He’s slightly disgusted to find that he’s missed it. Remus used to joke that Deceit and Virgil were just two sides of each other, Virgil usually punched him for it. 

“Virgil? Know what?” And this has sparked Thomas to look up too, Thomas with his  _ annoying  _ urge to always want to know  _ everything,  _ something that Logan has projected through of his own personality. 

“Nothing!” 

Deceit laughs, it’s a cold, jarring sound, and it painfully reminds Virgil of water breaking against rocks, of shattered glass; it’s not a nice association, “Nothing?  _ Nothing?”  _ Do they even know everything you’ve done?”

“Do they know what  _ you’ve done?”  _ Virgil's tone flips, and he can practically feel the shock go through those around him, all of them except for Deceit, who just has the barest traces of familiarity back in them now; 

Virgils playing the game.

He’s also  _ tired  _ of this game. If Deceit wants to air this out right here and now? Let him, but Virgils taking him down with him.

“What don’t I know?!” He feels bad for keeping Thomas in the dark, he knows that their Host gets even more anxious, even  _ without  _ Virgil's control, when he doesn’t know something. 

“You had to have known that dearest  _ Virgil _ here, used to be one of us?” Deceits voice turns to oil, to gasoline; he’s willing to burn everyone down around him.

Metaphorically of course. 

“One of…? One of  _ what?” _

“Don’t you  _ get  _ it Thomas? Virgil used to be one of us, one of the Dark Sides. He was one of the worst of us all, liked to fuck with Thomas’s feelings about everything.”

And there it is.

At least Deceit did him the favour of not bringing up his and Remus’s  _ friendship,  _ or his and Deceits own; that’s a whole other bag of worms that he would rather not open right now. Or at all. 

Silence goes round the room, almost all of them look surprised, except for Logan, and surprisingly Roman, who just blinks at the confirmation of what he probably always suspected.

Princey was always smarter than people gave him credit for.

“Virgil? What’s he talking about?”

“Virgil isn’t a dark side! Virgil’s good! Like us!” Poor Patton, with his endless optimism and hope for everybody and everything around him; Virgils never felt so horrible to have Patton believe in him. 

“Tell them Virgil? Tell them the  _ truth.”  _

Virgil shoots an apologetic, hesitant look around him, eyes bouncing between Thomas and Patton, and back to a solemn Deceit; he doesn’t look happy about this, changes are he never wanted it to unfold like this.

Virgil  _ hates  _ him all the same.

_ (He doesn’t, doesn't even come close; Virgil can’t imagine a world where he hates Deceit, no matter how hard he tries. You can’t erase that sort of friendship, can’t burn it to the ground; even the ashes will remain.)  _

“It’s...true. Deciets a known liar, but he’s not lying about...that.” 

“Oh-“ 

“ _ What-?”  _

“What do you mean by he was the worst of you?” Virgil could honestly throttle Logan, he could also probably kiss him. The other side has simultaneously distracted them from the previous conversation stop, and brought it back to something equally, if not more horrible to talk about.

Virgils is not proud of who he used to be, he’s not proud of the person he was starting to become when he was in the Dark-Mindscape. Like something was rotting in him from the inside out; he was becoming  _ cruel,  _ he promised he’d never be like that again.

Still, the urge is there, the urge to sink his teeth into what he  _ knows  _ Deceit is afraid of, to bring it to the surface; he swallows it down.

Deceit isn’t undeserving in his anger, Virgil left without anything more than a brief goodbye, ducking out in the middle of time when they were supposed to all be sleeping. Virgil doubts that Deceit even knows  _ why  _ he left. 

Remus certainly knew; but then again, the feral Side was always more perceptive than Virgil was comfortable with, at least whenever he wasn’t riding some sort of manic wave.

“It doesn’t matter-“ Virgil starts, but Deceit cuts him off with a mocking laugh,

“I thought you were  _ smart  _ Logic. Work it out. Everything thinks I was horrible, that I was this big bad  _ villain;  _ Virgil was the worst of us, except for maybe Orange. But Virgil used to  _ love  _ playing with Thomas’s feelings, experimenting with how much anxiety would send him over the edge.”

Virgil flinches back as if he’d been struck; like he said; he wasn’t proud of the things he had done, and even now, he feels shame curl around him, choking him, he didn’t want them to find out like this, didn’t want them to find out at all. 

“I was helping Thomas.” Virgil's voice is quiet, choked and full of an unknown emotion, but it’s still something he knows Deceit recognises; but the others' attention still swings onto him, their gazes intense. 

“We were all helping Thomas, Virgil, that’s our  _ job.  _ I never judged you for it.” 

It’s true. Deceit never judged him, no matter how much he pushed, no matter how much he messed with Thomas; Deceit was always there in the aftermath, when the backlash was basically corrupting Virgil.

The guilt grows bigger. 

“Now the truth is out there.  _ See,  _ even a  _ Liar,  _ can tell the truth.” Deceit snarls one last time, reaching away to sink out, and Virgil feels a brief, immature urge to reach out and  _ keep  _ him there. Deceit wasn’t his friend, but he was still someone that felt familiar. 

It’s silent for a moment, everybody processing what had just occurred, before Roman opens his mouth to awkwardly break the silence,

“Well th-“

“ _ Don’t.”  _ Virgil snaps, his tone slightly warped, before he sinks out, nausea and panic threatening to overwhelm him entirely.

_ Fuck.  _

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> hope you enjoyed!! I,, think about this idea So Much, I crave knowing more about Virgil and Deceits dynamic more than anything else lmao
> 
> sander sides discord server!! https://discord.gg/B2KyA5p
> 
> feel free to send prompts on tumblr!! (@forestgreengirl)


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